


golden gunned girls

by littlearrows



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Girl Gang, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Prostitution, F/F, F/M, Found Family, Organized Crime, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 18:36:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3906520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlearrows/pseuds/littlearrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re not good girls. They have no reason to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	golden gunned girls

They’re not good girls. They have no reason to be.

The other crews are families—tradition passed down through generations, great-grandfathers running the business until they’re in the ground, baby boys being raised with guns in their hands. Girls have no place with the others. Daughters are a blight, to be hidden away in guarded gardens and shipped off to foreign boarding school as soon as they get pretty.

They’re a family too—fire forged in blood and scars. They’re all girls. Girls are dangerous, Clarke tells the new recruits. Hell is a teenage girl, Octavia quotes to them as she sharpens her knives. Girls are angry and that makes them worthwhile, Raven says as she builds herself a new knee brace. The new recruits are wide-eyed and willful, desperate to prove they are angry and dangerous and hellish enough. It wouldn’t matter if they weren’t. Clarke isn’t one to turn away strays. Even Charlotte—a sweet little thing who vomited at her first sight of blood—has a place with them.

They take in all kinds, from all parts of town. Raven and Octavia came from graffiti-lined streets and apartment building with community bathrooms. They never had anything. Clarke came from a pristine penthouse with four hundred year old antiques and original 18th century art on the walls. She always had everything. In the end it doesn’t matter. Everyone has things they want to rectify, people they want avenged. The city is full of girls with dead eyes and hands hungry for blood.

Clarke loves her girls like they’re her own daughters. They all sleep in heaps in Clarke’s various safe houses. She stiches their wounds and cooks them meals. She clothes them and holds their hands when they get scared. Octavia and Raven don’t have much patience for those kinds of things; they see the girls for what they are—warriors, fighting turf wars and corrupt politics. They would never take a bullet for a foot solider. Clarke has taken three.

She hears the whispers. She knows she’s a legend. She never tries to stop them. Even her girls whisper about her, in the moonlight when they’re all piled together and thinks she’s asleep. They giggle and trade street stories they hear about her—how she and her crew turned into werewolves one night and slaughtered another, how her father was killed in prison after her mother sent him there, how she has three pet tigers that she dotes on, how she trained herself to shoot and now she never misses. Some are truer than others. She doesn’t mind the untrue rumors—they make larger than life. It paints a bigger target on her back, but she doesn’t care. She wants to teach her crew that even girls who were kicked into the mud can be golden myths.

__________

Clarke spends Thursday nights at Bellamy’s. When she was new to this all and ran with the Tree Crew, Lexa would tell her that men are useless—to be used as fighters and underlings but never to be let in the top ranks. At the time, Clarke believed her. Now she’s not so sure. She would give Bellamy a place in her crew, if he ever asked. He’s Octavia’s brother and rent boy that works one of the corners of Clarke’s territory. He has a list of grievances a mile long that Clarke wouldn’t mind helping with. But she knows he’ll never ask her if he can join. Despite their little romance, he would work alone if he ever went after the people who hurt him and Octavia, or start his own crew. She would give him a small portion of her territory. He has a few boys that follow him around her space, other rent boys or small time thieves that Clarke isn’t bothered by. She made him get rid of Murphy, the only one of Bellamy’s who she wouldn’t leave her girls alone with. She ran him out of town herself. Bellamy was pissy with her after that for a few weeks, but he got over it.

__________

Early Friday morning, Clarke is leaving Bellamy’s when she spots Lexa sitting on her motorcycle. Lexa hasn’t been allowed in Clarke’s territory ever since she betrayed their alliance to save her own neck. She cost three of Clarke’s girls their lives that day. Lexa looks like she’s alone, sitting pretty and fixing her lip gloss, but Clarke knows that she probably has a few marksmen in the surrounding buildings watching over her. Lexa’s deadly little guardian angels. She uses bows and arrows, or spears. They’re her signature.

Clarke approaches Lexa with her head held high. She has people too, her own teenage assassins lying in wait.

“Hey,” Lexa says, smacking her gum.

“What do you want, Lexa?”

“I have news about the Mountain Men.”

“The last time we faced the Mountain Men, you left my girls to die. I haven’t forgotten. And I don’t forgive. Why should I trust you?”

Lexa sighs prettily. Clarke notes bitterly that everything Lexa does is pretty. She frowns at the thought. “Fine,” she says. She gets off Clarke’s motorcycle and leaves a folder on the seat. She walks away without another word.

“Lexa,” Clarke calls after her. “Next time you’re in my territory, I won’t hesitate to take you out.” Lexa doesn’t give any indication that she heard Clarke, just keeps walking.

Clarke brings the files back to the safe house she’s operating out of these days. The feds are after her, for RICO and organized crime, so she has a dozen houses and identities at her disposal. Her girls are in the house, hanging around in their underwear, smoking and eating and napping. Her youngest hugs Clarke upon her arrival. Most are young enough that they should be in school, but girls like them fall through the cracks all the time. Clarke herself is only eighteen, got her start when she was sixteen and barefoot and stumbling through Lexa’s territory, getting eaten alive by the grief of her father’s death.

She makes her way through a haze of cigarette and marijuana smoke until she finds Octavia. Raven is the only of them still in school—studying mechanical engineering at NYU—and she’s in class. Clarke gives Octavia a signal to meet her upstairs.

Octavia is seventeen, on the cusp of womanhood. She is wanting and hungry for justice—with dried blood underneath her fingernails and a pistol she keeps hidden in a thigh holster underneath her skirt. She’s so opposite of Clarke—who lies in wait, can hold off vengeance for years. Octavia acts. When Clarke found her a year ago she was walking out of jail, knuckles bloody and arms filled with track marks, spitting and angry at the unfairness of her life. She had been arrested three times already. Clarke picked her up, brought her home and showed her how to refine her anger and addiction into something worthwhile. Octavia doesn’t mind mess, prefers to come home with blood spattered across her face. There’s a wild, savage beauty in her that Clarke will never achieve.

“We have news on the Mountain Men,” Clarke says and pulls out the files and photographs from the folder.

Human trafficking. That’s what the files tell her. The Mountain Men are notorious for it, taking girls and boys on their way home from school, drunken tourists stumbling through New York, young bike messengers who take a wrong turn. They’re not picky. The files outline auctions and trafficking patterns from the Mountain Men. The photos are them snatching up two little children and one young jogger in the park. Octavia crumples them up under her rough calloused hands. Clarke takes them from her, smooths them out and tacks them up to the wall. They’re her crew’s new focus.

“Where’d the files come from?”

“Tree Crew.”

Octavia looks away from Clarke. She knows Tree Crew are the enemies, have her crew sisters’ blood on their hands, but she has a loverboy who runs with them, Lincoln. She thinks Clarke doesn’t know. She should have realized by now that Clarke knows everything about her girls.

“Call Lincoln,” she says. Octavia’s head snaps up. Her eyes are alight with daring—daring Clarke to question her, daring herself to answer back. Clarke ignores that. “Tell him to set up a meeting with Lexa.” Octavia hums an agreement and goes into the bathroom to make the call.

They agree to meet with Lexa and her lieutenants, Anya and Indra, for lunch in Brooklyn. Anya taught Lexa everything she knows, when Lexa was still a little girl in pink party dresses, locked away in her father’s estate. Anya was her nanny, a Tibetan expat who Lexa’s father hired more for her record as an assassin than her record as being good with children. Lexa idolizes Anya, gave her a top rank in her crew the minute she took over. Indra is ruthless, quick with a knife and not one to talk things out. Lexa keeps her on a tight leash.

Raven gets home an hour after Octavia makes the plans. Raven is beautiful—brown skin that glistens in the sun from the oils she rubs into it, hair slicked back in braids adorned with thorns, winged eyeliner executed to perfection every time, deep purple lipstick. That’s what hooks the boys into her; they want to smear her lipstick and take out her braids and destroy destroy destroy, the way that men always do. But she’s more than a pretty face, much to their dismay. Raven is the muscle behind all of Clarke’s operations—modifying and building and planning all of Clarke’s weapons. She likes explosives the best, knows all the ways to make a place go _boom_. She mechanizes every bit of Clarke’s guns and knives. All of Clarke’s girls have an original Raven Reyes weapon of their choosing. She’s smart as a whip, graduating high school at fifteen, about to graduate college at nineteen. When she got shot, Clarke went on a rampage, killing the men who shot Raven slowly and painfully. Clarke knows how to make it hurt, made sure that they did not go softly. When the crew’s doctor dug Raven’s bullet out of her back, she took it and made a necklace out of it; she turns the bullet over and over in her hands when she’s thinking. Nowadays, Raven mostly stays inside the safe houses if she’s not at school. When Clarke tells her about their meeting that afternoon she insists on going, and Clarke gives in. She can never say no to Raven.

They meet for lunch in the back room of a dimly lit restaurant that Lexa chose. They get tall glasses of red wine and rare steak placed in front of them as soon as they arrive. They don’t touch their food, just sit and wait for Lexa and her lieutenants to arrive. They show up fifteen minutes late. Lexa sits down first, takes out glittery black nail polish and starts painting her nails at the table. Anya and Indra smirk as they sit down.

Clarke is patient, will sit here all day waiting for Lexa to speak first. She puts her hand over Octavia’s and squeezes hard to remind her to bite her tongue.

Finally, Lexa speaks, softly and slowly. “They have my Costia.”

Costia. Lexa’s French lover, who followed her back to New York when they were both only seventeen. She was picked up by the Mountain Men six months after they arrived. Lexa thought she was gone—dead or sold for sex to an unknown buyer, probably halfway across the world in Amsterdam or Eastern Europe. Lexa tore the city apart looking for her—one dead Mountain Man after another, all killed by Lexa’s blade as she questioned them on Costia’s whereabouts. None of them ever told, even when they were bleeding and broken. Until she met Clarke, Lexa’s grief made her cut off her emotions; she decided the empty place inside of her wasn’t worth it.

“How do you know?”

“Do not doubt your commander, sky girl,” Indra says, teeth bared. She’s never accepted that Lexa allowed Clarke to strike out on her own, still thinks of Clarke as one of Lexa’s soldiers, even after she gave away some of her territory to get Clarke started. Lexa tells Indra to be quiet.

“Address Clarke by her name or go wait in the car,” Lexa reprimands sharply. Indra and a few others in Tree Crew still call Clarke sky girl. She was named for where she came from, the penthouse suite of a high rise in the Upper East Side. Clarke doesn’t mind the name, even calls her crew the Sky Clan, but Lexa has always hated it. When they were together, she would whisper Clarke’s name as she dragged her lips across Clarke’s skin, over and over like a mantra.

Indra sits back in her seat, quiet. She cuts into her steak, stabbing it in the middle while keeping eye contact with Clarke. Octavia, Raven and Anya start eating and drinking when Indra does.

“They sent me a video and pictures,” Lexa says. “Costia is in one of their warehouses, in a cell with three boys. I think one them is from the Ice Nation, another one is maybe from the River Crew? I don’t know the third.”

“And you’re sure it’s recent? It wasn’t from five years ago, before she got sold?”

“I know Costia. She’s older in everything they sent me. Her hair is longer, and she has a scar across her cheek that wasn’t there before.”

“What do you want us to do about it?”

“Clarke, you forget that I know you too,” Lexa says. “You have a bleeding heart.” Clarke bristles at the accusation. “I know you want to save those kids I told you about this morning. And they’ve killed your girls in the past—Fox, Roma and Trina, to name a few, but there have been others. All thirteen families have people that were taken from them by the Mountain Men. Ally with me, and we’ll wipe them from the Earth.”

Clarke jabs a knife into the table, next to Lexa’s outstretched hand. “How dare you say their names,” she says, incensed. “Fox and Roma and Trina were killed only after _you_ abandoned us, broke our alliance and left them to die. I sent them in to be spies. Your people were supposed to get them out. That was the deal. But you turned coward and ran home. The Mountain Men sent me videos, too, Lexa. Videos of them torturing and murdering my girls. I will never ally with you again.” Out of the corner of her eye, Clarke can see Octavia staring Indra down, twirling a butterfly knife in her hand. Raven is toying with her gun in her lap, eyes locked with Anya’s.

Lexa slams pictures down on the table and slides them to Clarke. It’s the little kids from the pictures this morning, this time in black SUVs. They look like they’re banging on the windows and shouting. The girl’s dress is torn.

“You don’t have to trust me or my people. But these kids deserve to go home to their mothers, don’t you think Clarke?”

Clarke closes her eyes, focusing on her own breathing. She opens her eyes, takes the pictures and tucks them into her bra. “Fine. We’ll ally with you. For these kids. And for my girls who were taken. But not for you or for Costia.” She and her girls get up from the table at the same time, one fluid motion, and leave lunch.

__________

Four days later, Clarke is sitting with Lexa, and eleven others. They’re all old men, who have had life hand everything to them on a silver platter. They’re not like her, or Lexa. They’ve never fought to get to where they are. Lexa killed two male cousins after her father’s death, teeth gritted in determination to take over her father’s crew, familial blood pouring over her hands. She had been sent away to Europe as a teenager with her mother, to live in the French countryside, away from grime and blood and the filthiness that consumes the lives of people like them. When she heard of her father’s death, she whisked herself away from France and came back to her home prepared for battle. Three years later she found Clarke and taught her how to become a lionhearted warrior, ready for the mess that was to come.

Lexa speaks, the other leaders hanging off her every word. Lexa always knew how to charm them. She’s not above smiling prettily and sitting on the laps of old men to do it—although it repulses her. If they looked into her eyes they would know that she wants them dead, all of them and their sons. They never do, of course, focused too much on her intoxicating French perfume and her whispering in their ears. Lexa thinks girls should run the whole thing. Clarke, when she sees Lexa being groped by wrinkled hands trying to get underneath her dress and catcalled by her equals, is inclined to agree with her. In the end, Lexa gets the other eleven crews to ally with them against the Mountain Men, who have taken people from everyone’s families, sold them off to the highest bidder for sex or labor. “Blood must have blood,” she tells them. “Jus drein jus daun,” they parrot back, in an old mob language that Octavia has a better grip on than Clarke. They’re all agreeing to end the Mountain Men, in whatever way possible. As they all chant together, Clarke feels hope flutter alive in her chest.

__________

Bellamy is gentle with her. Lexa was always so rough, pulling her hair and sucking bruises into her thighs; their kisses were teeth cracking together and bitten lips. Bellamy holds her softly, ghosting his lips over hers until she closes the gap between them. His clients pull him apart in every different direction, taking and taking until there’s so little of him left. Clarke pours her love into Bellamy like warm sand, filling up the pieces of him he thought were gone.

In a way, Bellamy never stood a chance. Him and Octavia’s mother was a prostitute in this territory, working one block away from Bellamy’s corner. She was killed by one her johns. Her death was never investigated, just another dead whore to the police. Bellamy’s hands ache for his mother killer’s blood. Octavia’s do too. Bellamy raised her, held her in the nights when the neighborhood gunshots scared her, kissed her forehead when he thought she had a fever. She fell off the rails when he was arrested when she was fifteen. He got 13 months for stealing and misdemeanor assault, just enough time for Octavia to find alcohol and drugs and the rush that comes from punching another person. And Clarke. She found Clarke, too. When he got out he tried to scare Clarke into forcing Octavia to leave the Sky Clan. “She’s not a hostage,” Clarke had said to him. “She can leave whenever she wants.” She warned him not to come back. Three weeks later, they fell into bed together. He’s never made her pay for it, not like when he slept with Raven, or Roma. They paid.

He gets wind of the plans to take out the Mountain Men. By now everyone has, little children on the playgrounds and elderly _abuelas_ sipping coffee on their porches. As he runs his lips softly over her shoulder, pulling her bra strap off with gentle fingers, he asks when it’s going down.

“Soon,” she tells him, running her hands through his hair as he kisses his way down her body. “In the next few weeks.”

He pulls himself up so they're face to face. She can count his freckles, all the tiny constellations etched into his skin, waiting to be mapped by her lips. “You’ll keep Octavia safe, won’t you?” Truthfully, nothing scares Bellamy except the idea of Octavia getting hurt. Clarke nods and kisses his cheekbone, with an array of freckles that look like a howling wolf, hungry for the moon. It fits—Bellamy is a wolf hearted boy, Romulus and Remus reincarnated, who exists in the star light of society, the dark underbelly of civilization. She does too.

They end up having sex that night, although they don’t always. Sometimes it’s better to just hold one another, drifting in and out of sleep as they count the other’s breaths; other times they ride the subways all night, going to and from other territories undetected, their hearts racing at the thought of getting caught by another family. Once they went to a secret show in Manhattan, spent all night trying to track down where it was being held. That was the strangest of all—how easily they slipped on their masks, became an average girl and an average boy, in love and wandering around New York City on a sleepy snowy night. No one who looked at them could have guessed that Clarke had a revolver in her clutch and Bellamy had a knife hidden up his sleeve.

When she’s leaving the next morning, ready to be back home to watch over her girls as they braid hair and practice with their machetes, he kisses her harder than he ever has before. “Stay safe,” he tells her; those are always his parting words. She nods and leaves him naked in bed without saying another word.

__________

Maya is her latest find; Clarke plucks her up off the streets two weeks before they’re attacking the Mountain Men. Maya is quiet, eyes darting from person to person, sister to sister, as if she might bolt at any moment. She could. No one would stop her. Clarke has had a few girls over the years that drift in and out, or leave altogether. But Clarke knows Maya won’t—she has no home and she’s cut from the same cloth as the rest of them, littered with scars and starved for vengeance. There is a tiger inside her soul, awakening a bit more at the sounds of her sisters sharpening their knives. On her second day in the house, she asked Clarke to tattoo her the crew’s signature ink—flowers going over both wrists like handcuffs.

She has a little thing going with Jasper, one of Bellamy’s boys. He’s a pot dealer, selling to the elderly during the community center’s bingo nights. It’s not much money since he barely charges them enough to make a profit, which makes Clarke think he’s not good enough for Maya since he has his head in the clouds instead of in his business. His best friend Monty, who used to turn tricks with Bellamy before he got hired by some big time tech company in Manhattan, pays all of Jasper’s bills. Clarke catches him sleeping on her couch once after a late night with Maya, and chased him out by throwing knives at him, narrowing missing his head every time. She has rules in her house, and one is boys never sleep over, aren’t even allowed inside without her permission. She won’t risk her girls’ safety like that. Charlotte, whose father put his hands all over her before she was old enough to know what was happening, clung to Clarke tightly all day, scared that Jasper would come back. Charlotte likes Jasper well enough, lighting fireworks with him on the Fourth of July and giving him a cookie whenever she bakes them, but that doesn’t matter much when two years after she left home she’s still screaming in the night about her father’s sick smile and hands that smells like gasoline.

When Maya hear their plans of going the Mountain Men, she’s eager to join them, to prove herself to the Sky Clan and get blood beneath her fingernails. She was born into the Mountain Men, raised off the grid in warehouses and basements, traveling in black SUVs with bulletproof windows. She’s never stepped foot inside a school or store or church; she got an education in how to traffic people, learned about the economy by selling girls to strangers on the internet and was taught how to worship by the Mountain Men leaders whispering in her ears that they’re the closest thing to God she’ll ever see. She narrowly escaped with her life when they found out that she had been smuggling people out before they could get trafficked out of New York.

Octavia and Raven see her as an asset first, sister second. They’re constantly having her draw maps of their warehouses; provide information about their leaders; give intel on weapons. Clarke doesn’t blame them for it, knows that information is important for what they’re about to do. But she’ll never see Maya like that, or any of her girls.

They are her daughters and sisters, lovers of her soul. Sometimes when they’re all piled in bed together, hot breaths on her skin and sweaty arms clinging to each other tightly, she thinks they’re her soul mates. They were made for each other. They give her a reason to stick around—truthfully Clarke could give up revenge and guns and money if she could still spend her life being the Sky Clan leader, playing mother and sibling to her girls. But she can’t—she knows what they need, has carved out her life based on providing them with knives and chances to wash the mud out of their spirits. She is their golden winged guardian angel and she is good at her job.

__________

The thirteen families make plans, and backup plans, and backup plans for their backup plans. Every single crew member in New York knows their bit, realizes that they are all only one part of the delicate dance their leaders have contrived. Everyone must play their part to perfection to get it right. Clarke and Lexa exchange glances that say that they don’t trust the other crews, especially the men—who are too talkative, their footsteps too loud. They plan in secret, coming up with ways for their two crews to still pull it off.

In the end, it all goes off without a hitch. Sky Clan and the River Crew take out the guards and smuggle prisoners out of the warehouses while the other eleven families take out various safe houses and leaders. River Crew takes the adults; Clarke sees them ushering Costia into a black town car, radioing to Lexa that they have her. Children cling to Clarke’s girls, each of them carrying three at a time out to the cars. They drop them off at churches and hospitals, knowing that they’ll be returned back their mothers and fathers around the world soon enough. The kids are crying and holding tightly to Clarke’s shirt; she has to pry their fingers off. She kisses them each on the forehead, mumbling prayers in Latin against their skin.

__________

A year later, she and her girls leave New York. They head for sunny California, heads full of dreams about vineyards and tan lines. They drive, SUVs and motorcycles and, once in Kentucky, they steal an RV, taking turns sleeping on real beds in the night. When they get there, Clarke can hear the cold waves breaking against the shoreline, her girls giggling. They sound happy, and she feels free.

**Author's Note:**

> [visuals here](http://freshprinceof-pyke.tumblr.com/tagged/girl-gang-au)
> 
> note: real girl gangs are mostly made up disenfranchised women of color who turn to violence due to having very little or no other options. they are very violent and traumatic for these young women. to help some of these REAL girls consider donating to local youth shelters, Boys & Girls Clubs or other educational resources in your area.


End file.
